Policy-driven planning in coalitions - A case study

(c)IFAAMASPeer reviewedPostprin

Evaluation criteria for the MORSE simulation environment

Abstract: "This document is intended for researchers who will be using the MORSE simulator for their team-oriented experiments. It specifies some initial criteria that can be used to evaluate the performance of the test subjects. This document also specifies the log events that are generated by MORSE and that can be used for such evaluations.

Toward identifying process models in ad hoc and distributed teams

This article reports work on first steps toward characterizing a negotiation process model for ad hoc and distributed groups or teams, so that automation can more accurately track the states of a negotiation from human discourse. We devised three experimental scenarios and ran human subject experiments that involved group decision-making and consensus building. Our experiments showed that the communication patterns of successful distributed ad hoc teams differed in two significantly different conditions. We describe our motivations, experimental design and results

Probabilistic Verification of Coordinated Multi-Robot Missions

Robots are increasingly used to perform a wide variety of tasks, especially those involving dangerous or inaccessible locations. As the complexity of such tasks grow, robots are being deployed in teams, with complex coordination schemes aimed at maximizing the chance of mission success. Such teams operate under inherently uncertain conditions -- the robots themselves fail, and have to continuously adapt to changing environmental conditions. A key challenge facing robotic mission designers is therefore to construct a mission -- i.e., specify number and type of robots, number and size of teams, coordination and planning mechanisms etc. -- so as to maximize some overall utility, such as the probability of mission success. In this paper, we advocate, formalize, and empirically justify an approach to compute quantitative utility of robotic missions using probabilistic model checking. We show how to express a robotic demining mission as a restricted type of discrete time Markov chain (called αPA), and its utility as either a linear temporal logic formula or a reward. We prove a set of compositionality theorems that enable us to compute the utility of a system composed of several αPAs by combining the utilities of each αPA in isolation. This ameliorates the statespace explosion problem, even when the system being verified is composed of a large number of robots. We validate our approach empirically, using the probabilistic model checker PRISM